Chapter 8 - The Document on the Screen
Chaos erupted in the auditorium.
Reporters leaned forward, shouting questions over one another. Camera shutters clicked frantically like a swarm of locusts. Security guards rushed down the side aisles, but Claire held up her hand, holding a sleek black USB drive above her head.
“If security touches us,” Claire yelled toward the technicians' booth at the back of the hall, “the digital files currently uploaded to the press portal will go live instantly to every media outlet in the state!”
The lead technician, a young man who had spent three years working minimum wage shifts, looked at the files on his monitor, saw the verified legal seals, and hesitated.
Maya stepped forward, taking her place beside Claire. She looked directly up at Grant Alden on the elevated stage.
“My name is Maya Reed,” Maya proclaimed, her voice echoing through the house speakers as Claire handed her a lavalier microphone. “Nineteen years ago, my mother, Sarah Reed-Alden, died on an operating table after a hit-and-run accident on a country road.”
Grant collapsed back into his leather chair on stage, his breath coming in shallow, ragged gasps.
Evelyn jumped to her feet, her voice screaming through her own podium mic. “She’s an impostor! Cut her microphone! Security, remove these girls right now!”
“Look at her face!” Claire shouted back, turning toward the gallery of five hundred shareholders. “Look at her eyes! Look at her birthmark! She is my sister! She is Grant Alden’s firstborn daughter!”
On the massive fifty-foot digital screen behind the executive board—the screen meant to display the company’s twenty-year financial growth projections—an image suddenly flickered to life.
It was a high-resolution scan of the original marriage certificate between Grant Arthur Alden and Sarah Elizabeth Reed, dated twenty years ago in Beaufort County.
Beside it appeared a secondary document: a certified birth record from Walterboro Memorial Hospital, listing Grant Alden as the biological father of Maya Elizabeth Reed.
The auditorium went utterly wild.
Reporters leapt from their seats, pushing past security barricades to snap close-up photographs of the giant screen. Board members stood up in outrage, pointing furiously at Grant and Evelyn.
“Is this real?!” a lead shareholder shouted from the front row. “Grant, is this authentic?!”
Grant Alden could not speak. He sat frozen in his executive chair, his eyes fixed on Maya’s face. In her eyes, he saw the ghost of Sarah Reed standing in the light, demanding the justice she had been denied for nineteen long years.
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Evelyn turned toward her husband, her face twisted in absolute, monstrous rage. “You fool!” she shrieked, her voice picked up clearly by the open microphones. “You said her grandmother signed the non-disclosure agreement! You said the girl would never know!”
That single, desperate admission from Evelyn Alden echoed through the five hundred speakers in the room, sealing their fate forever.
